January 31, 2010
August 23, 2009
Emory Douglas
October 21, 2008
sweet music
September 17, 2008
mogollon at diamond
June 15, 2008
art's ant
From the journal...
"Jonathan Meese, 'art's ant,' fullfils his purpose, his purpose in the service or Art. Art created everything, all gods are most loving ideologies of Art. Art is not a religion, but every religion is Art. Everything that is religious most lovingly ends up in the Museum, great, great, great. Jonathan Meese believes in everything. Every god is a mandate of Art. Art is not a god, but all gods can play with each other in the Dictatorship Of Art. Art is absolute protection. The Dictatorship Of Art is an eternal time of revolution. When the Dictatorship Of Art reigns, a new era begins: Everything will play. Art does not produce victims and martyrdom. (Great.)"
June 07, 2008
Toys
“And so, dear Stefano, I will give you guns. And I will teach you to play extremely complicated wars, where the truth will never be entirely on one side. You will release a lot of energy in your young years, and your ideas may be a bit confused, but slowly you will develop some convictions. Then, when you are grown up, you will believe that it was all a fairy tale: little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, the guns, the cannons, single combat, the witch and the seven dwarfs, armies against armies. But if by chance, when you are grown up, the monstrous characters of your childish dreams persist, witches, trolls, armies, bombs, compulsory military service, perhaps, having gained a critical attitude toward fairy tales, you will learn to live and criticize reality.”
[Text from Misreadings. More about Eco's Diario Minimo here.]
May 19, 2008
December 30, 2007
Descarga (!)
As a melomano at heart, I consider Héctor Lavoe’s biopic "El Cantante" one of the biggest tragedies of this year that is about to end. Probably devised as a vehicle to showcase its celebrities, the film stayed at the most superficial level possible, ratifying sad Latino stereotypes and failing to address a social context that is impossible to detach from Lavoe’s career.
Paraphrasing César Miguel Rondón, born in New York, Salsa was spontaneously adopted in barrios all over Latin America in a process driven by folks [as opposed to record labels] who could very well identify with the experience of New York City’s Latin communities. At the center of it and unifying feelings across the region was a mix of violence and poverty as well as a huge need for real media representation. As you can imagine it was a bit difficult for the typical Latino to identify himself with the Rolling Stones or with the bad guy on TV.
Beyond its quality and a great deal of innovation, it was consistency with daily life the defining factor that turned Salsa into a regional phenomenon on its way to achieve global importance. The music in its most pure form is still part of the most eclectic environments: From the Paris neighborhood bar to big bands in Japan. Let’s hope that its history doesn’t get lost in translation, it should be as essential to the music as the music itself.
October 16, 2007
OutMigration
I wrote about OutMigration last July in the context of a post about Dinner Theater, or better said, a modern remediation of the art form. Fortunately for us in New York the folks of Monkey Town, Accidental Movement, and Brooklyn-based art direction powerhouse Mogollon , decided to join forces again and put together version 2.0 of the show. Like the original, OutMigration promises a 360-degree stimulation of our senses in one of those experiences that still feels ahead of its time.
October 08, 2007
Communications Design
As discussed in a previous post, Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries’ Massive Change proposes to filter culture through the eyes of design in an effort to apply the transformational techniques and overall problem-solving philosophy of the discipline everywhere. Design transcends design itself, augmenting “human possibility” while reducing “complexity.”
Communications as part of the broader system of Information Economies, offers an interesting area of analysis when it comes to the application of the fundamental thinking and philosophy of design to the process of planning communications programs.
Modern society certainly demands better communication, businesses and other organizations crave great communication ideas as an essential part of their very existence (corporate, brand, etc), the media establishment is intensively reinventing itself around new communications systems that include people in their new role as active participants, new media outlets experiment with their own systems as the balance of power is shifting in favor of the stronger idea as opposed to just capital… the list of actors can go on for a long time, in short, communications is at the core of society, better communication systems, programs, plans, will benefit many.
Fortunately there is a wealth of literature that can help people considering applying rigorous Design Thinking to Communications Planning. This month Wallpaper magazine invited the legendary Dieter Rams to edit his own 20-page section of the magazine [plus one of the three covers], where among other things, the designer offers “ten simple statements” that capture the philosophy that influences his work.
The following is an exercise that attempts to apply those principles to Communications Planning as a way to illustrate the tremendous possibility of interdisciplinary thinking. As the “product” of Communications Planning is communications itself, feel free to substitute “product” for campaign, program, ad, poster, website, and the like.
ONE: “Good design is innovative.” – Rams explains that copying existing product forms or creating novelty for novelty’s sake won’t do it. Perhaps the best way to stimulate innovation from the beginning is by tackling every communications project in its own unique manner, eliminating overused processes and documents that lead to familiar territories.
TWO: “Good design makes a product useful.” – The use of any piece of communication results in value for people interacting with it. Value can exist in multiple forms (information, entertainment, connectivity, etc.) and is intimately linked to a particular context.
THREE: “Good design is aesthetic.” – Richard Lanham has an entire book on the subject, in essence, the Attention Economy demands communications that are able to seamlessly navigate between Substance and Style, which are not only inseparable but interchangeable given the right context.
FOUR: “Good design helps a product to be understood.” – Just avoid having to explain whatever is that you are trying to communicate; if the communication creates more questions than answers, then it needs to be reinvented from scratch.
FIVE: “Good design is unobtrusive.” This statement will probably spark a few discussions around interception versus interruption. Mau’s book starts with a clever line: “…design is invisible. Until it fails.” It seems counterintuitive that a communications campaign should be unobtrusive but it all boils down to making communication that is “useful” and that negotiates a proper “aesthetic” balance.
SIX: “Good design is honest.” Don’t lie or use false claims and avoid being pretentious, that simple.
SEVEN: “Good design is durable.” Rams adds that “Waste must no longer be tolerated.” This principle lives at the core of great product design and clearly opposes the “waste-producing” nature of certain areas of our modern economy. Waste in communications is easy to spot and comes in many shapes: Repetition to the point of saturation, meaningless messages, faddish use of media channels, pointless executions…
EIGHT: “Good design is consistent to the last detail.” The application of messages to different channels without considering the functional nature of the medium often leads to deep inconsistencies that radically affect what we are trying to say. Video pre-roll ads are the perfect example.
NINE: “Good design is concerned with the environment.” Rams is concerned with nature as well as with “visual pollution” and other undesirables that affect a broader definition of environment. In the case of communications, we might want to consider the “social environment,” which might lead to socially-responsible communications. Think of the old British motto: “Unwelcome means not working.”
TEN: “Good design is as little design as possible.” Let me refer you again to Maeda’s work on simplicity.
Timeless design...
August 26, 2007
GOOD Thinking
The folks from IDEO contributed with GOOD magazine first anniversary issue’s graphic statement with two images that help us visualize, not only the spirit of the magazine’s main feature [and its urgency], but also at least part of the essence of Bruce Mau and the Institute without Boundaries’ Massive Change premise, which challenges our preconceptions about design by reminding us that “…it is not about the world of design; but about the design of the world.”
The article in question celebrates the transition of design from a noun to a verb, automatically expanding its scope: “Beyond improving the living rooms of those for whom Design is already within reach, design will improve the lives of every person on Earth.” Crazy but possible, as Massive Change suggests through revisiting old and new disciplines, re-framing [or un-framing] them within the paradigm of economies awaiting for design solutions.
Design as a vehicle for change. Dramatic, massive, even elegant change.
Take Information Technology [IT] as an example; viewed through the lens of "Information Economies," analysts can appreciate a different set of mechanics as well as a variety of new roles for their actors: Geeks writing code suddenly become lawmakers as Stanford’s Lawrence Lessig explains in an interview published in Mau’s book: “In implementing and choosing the architectures that will define cyberspace, you’re implementing and choosing certain architectures to enable or disable values. So you’re making political choices. What’s troubling is when these political choices are made by entities that aren’t responsible publicly; we then begin to worry about the extent to which this kind of private lawmaking defeat public values.”
Design can have a deep impact on Information Economies simply by helping us better understand the complexities of a world that literally speaks its own language. The development of a global interface that makes understanding and interacting with the world of IT accessible to the majority is essential to the future of democracy in an information-driven society.
The case of IT as one of the many realms that fit within Information Economies is probably a bit more obvious than some of the others touched by Massive Change [and by GOOD’s feature which introduces a simple, yet thought-provoking lingo to review design], anything from Urban Economies to Living Economies, or Image Economies to Military Economies, can indeed be influenced by the good thinking that lives at the core of Design.
July 05, 2007
New Door Sign
![sinSign[dot]com-thumb.jpg](http://www.sinsign.com/weblog/archives/images/sinSign%5Bdot%5Dcom-thumb.jpg)
July 02, 2007
Dead End
A previous post about Brazilian TV series City of Men was partly inspired by an article that I wrote back in 2004 about violence in Latin American cinema. The idea was to discuss the mythology of violence [true lowbrow semiotics] as well as some of its main drivers through reviewing three great contemporary films: Cidade de Deus [City of God], Huelepega [Glue Sniffer], and La Virgen de los Sicarios [Our Lady of the Assassins].
The three films dealt with violence in some of the most dangerous cities of the region: Caracas, Medellin, and Rio de Janeiro. Despite differences in language and culture, these cities share a few traits [from topography since the three are valleys with Favelas dominating the mountains, to their citizens' love for well-known brands] that make the comparison relevant, these similarities become evident when analyzing popular culture in general and these films in specific. The prevalence of this unfortunate circumstance position this analysis in a more significant context today than three years ago.
Here is the link to the article; it might be useful for people studying the subject matter. If you are interested in a deeper examination check out this 2006 Spiegel article which offers interesting insights on the situation.
An ever-growing Caracas’ Favela. Picture grabbed from Google Earth.
May 08, 2007
Music by Association [Vol. 002]
Celebrate Spring. Vive La Fête-inspired radio station.
April 08, 2007
Hiatus
March 18, 2007
Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard contributed to the literature around consumption and its actors in a unique manner, his approach was more related to the object and its mythology than to the politics and ideology that provides context to consumer society. The Economist referred to him as a philosopher of consumerism, denoting his importance in a world that is in part sustained by people in their role as consumers. This week’s obituary in the magazine is devoted to the philosopher and there is one paragraph that captures an essential insight that defines him in many ways:
“…in his world, both the liberal and the communist narratives of history had collapsed. ´The end of history’ was no longer universal capitalism and democracy or the victory of the proletariat. It was summed up for Mr. Baudrillard by a lone man jogging, obvious to his surroundings, hearing only the music of his own sound-system and aware only of the statements he himself was making: health, fashion, endurance. He was running straight ahead, but with no end in view.”
As an insider and even a symbol of postmodernism, Baudrillard was probably too aware of the unnecessary baggage that came with any side of the political spectrum, he wasn’t a philosopher of the left precisely because the left was incompatible with his object of analysis: it was and still is too easy to produce a critique of consumerism that is aligned with the moral values of the left. Such a task would have been far from an intellectual challenge. On the other hand, by detaching himself from the dichotomy of good and evil [or left and right for that matter], he could provide an honest point of view with actual influence in modern life.
The “lone man jogging” has no vision of the future, perhaps because for him the future is happening now and it is more interesting to focus his energy on the kind of statement that he wants to make now, in the future. On the other hand, the statement is clear: we are what we do, but beyond that, we construct ourselves with the tools available on today’s consumer society that usually manifest themselves in a complex system of products, services, and brands, all powered by media.
Right at the center of this system is advertising, and Baudrillard certainly understood its inner mechanisms. In an essay published in 1970 titled La Societé de consommation, available in English here under the title Mass Media Culture, he explained that advertising, beyond the true and the false had to work by eliminating “meaning and proof… inducing tautological repetition,” which was then validated by the public through the act of purchasing.
What Baudrillard meant is that advertising’s technique is rooted in a message house [borrowing the term from PR] in which its message narcissistically focuses on the product it advertises to the point that it becomes a “self-fulfilling prophecy,” which relies on a “circular argument.” At the end advertising worked through repetition: “It is thus repetition itself that everywhere ensures effective causality.” Let’s keep in mind that almost all of his work was produced at the peak of the success [even control] of traditional mass media, and this had an intrinsic effect on his views of advertising and popular culture in general.
Almost three decades later mass media is no longer limited by the traditional players and a seemingly unlimited number of options are available to society at large in most western countries. This changes the rules of the game for advertising, and probably makes Baudrillard’s point even more relevant today than in 1970 because advertising no longer can survive on the basis of a persuasive monologue about itself and much less betting on repetition as essential to its success. Today, advertising needs to do exactly the opposite: open itself to a dialogue in the context of the brand but supported on a real viewpoint while assuming that there is only one opportunity to establish a relationship with its audience.
Revisiting the work of such an extraordinary thinker should not only be a pleasure but also a matter of life and death in today’s troubled communications industry. By devoting an entire career to develop a philosophical system surrounding signs, objects, and symbolic acts, Jean Baudrillard left us with a rich toolbox packed with intellectual gear ready to tackle today’s challenges with the substance needed to make any real impact.
March 09, 2007
The Dichotomy of Mass Culture
Umberto Eco usually dismissed the term “mass culture” as too broad and vague to mean anything at all. In a series of essays published in the early 60’s and titled “Apocalittici e Integrati,” Eco recognized that the generic ambiguity of mass culture is in part responsible for the radical debate about its value and effects in society, leading to the development of two opposed mindsets: the apocalyptic and the integrated [my translation, not sure is accurate].
Probably the best way to understand each side of the debate is through their manifestation in the media. The apocalyptic approach resides in texts about mass culture, as opposed to the integrated, which emerges from the texts produced by mass culture. This dichotomy led to the series of essays on media, popular culture, and modern society that today deserve a second look in the context of a very different landscape that might have an amplifying effect on the apocalyptic and integrated.
The base of Eco’s view can’t be detached from the fact that in the 1960’s [and 70’s, 80’s, 90’s…] both sides of the equation were represented by members of an elite that controlled the means of production of mass culture, the attention of society, or both. The typical apocalyptic was embodied by professors, writers, journalists, and other intellectuals. The integrated was more involved in the process of actually creating mass culture in TV, radio, print, advertising, etc.
Both camps had in common one trait of the pre-digital era: access to filters. Prominent intellectuals could have their voice heard in certain media vehicles because their reputation ensured an audience. TV executives could essentially do whatever they wanted as long as it attracted viewers and advertisers.
What happens to apocalittici e integrati when the filters disappear?
As the line between consumers and producers blur and access to the media is not necessarily linked to influence, these two characters mutate into hyper-versions of themselves. The “culture” in mass culture seems to be reinventing itself by the “mass” which probably fuels the argument of the apocalyptic, perhaps transforming them into superapocaliptics at the same time that makes the point of view of its nemesis not only stronger but also faceless and hence harder to aim at.
Here is a link to Rocco Capozzi’s essay on Eco and Mass culture, which deals with interesting questions on a subject that seems to be more relevant today than almost five decades ago.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find the book in English, perhaps the full series of essays published in the book titled “Apocalittici e Integrati” is only available in Italian and Spanish, let us know if you find the English-language version, this is certainly a reading that is worth the effort.
February 20, 2007
The Virtual Citizen
If you haven’t followed the latest discussion about Second Life [SL] you can thank Henry Jenkins for his clear summary and remarkable contribution in his blog. Probably the most important trait of the conversation is that it took the debate about SL outside of SL and into the realm of virtual worlds or multiverses [term coined by Neal Stephenson]. What might be surprising is that in the discussions, the multiverse is isolated from its interactions with other media, and in the process the debate left out MTV’s Virtual Hills and Laguna Beach, which can offer some answers to the key questions asked during the conversation.
It is impossible to make any accurate predictions about the evolution of multiverses as isolated communication channels; however, it can be feasible to think of them as extensions and parts of more complex multimedia experiences like the one that MTV is developing. The size of the audience is completely irrelevant at this point and, as the focus of discussion, it pales in the light of all the cultural happenings that are emerging around these spaces.
Some brands like Cingular, Secret [P&G], and Pepsi already began experimenting in the Virtual Laguna Beach, which according to MTV already has an audience of 300,000 users. The experimentation that is happening throughout the few multiverses available can be interpreted as an inexpensive way of participating in the conversation with their users at the same time that it helps professionals in the whole spectrum of communications gather valuable [qualitative] learnings about people’s interaction with the virtual persona of [mostly] well-known brands.
It is very likely that no multiverse will ever get the amount of users that some of the pundits questioned in the discussion [again, for details go here], but if we think about it, that might be the equivalent of expecting that a single website would capitalize all the traffic on the internet cannibalizing all other players. After all, the internet is likely to remain the platform that will support most multiverses in the foreseeable future, and we could expect that more virtual worlds will join the landscape as tastes and mindsets will group and regroup users according to their interests. It is possible to consider a future in which thousands of multiverses coexist as support to real-world experiences that can vary from TV shows like the MTV example to an actual representation of the Real Estate market [imagine going shopping for your next condo in a 3D Century 21 multiverse].
Coming back to the present, it can be useful to take a look at the multiple uses of the virtual world by the people that actually live the experience. This is essential to evaluate [beyond the numbers] whether or not these spaces offer a truly engaging medium to its users. While it is true that some of it reflects the dark early beginnings of the web [tons of porn, gambling, etc], there are several users remixing the content, byproduct, and even the original purpose of the multiverse and bringing their own experiences into more “traditional” venues, here are a few examples:
Another interesting manifestation of community engagement can be found at the heart of the business community in SL through BMW’s Munich Express [Achim Muellers, Head of Brand Relations and Cooperation] conversation with a crew from Second Life Business Communicators Group. The conversation was rather deep and happened in-world on January, for a complete transcript visit the group’s site.
February 13, 2007
Music by Association [Vol. 001]
Beirut-inspired radio station. Enjoy.
February 12, 2007
Semiotics of the Unwelcome
Author Walter Kirn shared his thoughts on ubiquitous advertising in a must-read piece published in yesterday’s New York Times magazine. His account articulates the result of a dangerous practice in the marketing and communications industry that has been lately labeled as 360o marketing, in which brands surround people with messages across a variety of media channels. The more the merrier.
The problem with this kind of marketing is that, as Kirn suggests, it reflects a myopic vision of communications in which all impressions are created equal. The truth might be closer to the opposite, in these days every brand message must consider its context, which by the way, is not exclusively defined by the medium as it probably was a couple of decades ago.
The UK-based Centre for Integrated Marketing used an enlightening phrase (in some paper that I don’t remember now) to summarize the issue: “Unwelcome means not working.” It doesn’t matter how clever the ad is, the message won’t be properly digested if the person at the other end feels invaded. The intended meaning will be lost and replaced by negative feelings in most cases. At the end all impressions are not equal, some are extremely positive and create long-lasting relationships, some might be neutral and go unnoticed, and some are just unwelcome and extract life out of your brand.
Here are some examples provided by Time Magazine’s 2006 Person of the year and Advertising Age’s 2006 Agency of the Year.
January 29, 2007
Blogging TV
A wealth of evidence is turning mere futuristic scenarios into collective anxiety about the future of television. The long-time king and queen of media is going through a process of reinvention that has the potential of messing up badly with its current economics, which hence justify in big part all the confusion and mixed predictions about its future.
A quick scan over traditional media in the past few days can confirm the intensification of the debate; ADWEEK speculates whether or not “New Nielsen data could lead to chaotic upfront,” referring to the controversial commercial ratings data, which could provide some light on whether or not people are actually recalling advertising from watching it live or via pre-recorded DVR sessions.
FORTUNE magazine’s Geoff Colvin published a piece titled “TV is dying? Long live TV!” that deals with the fact that America is watching more TV than ever, “despite (or because of) the Web,” which seems counterintuitive but can help us understand the latest wave of gadgets and platforms focused on enabling digital content on TV sets as well as TV content on other screens.
Irregardless of whether people watch more or less TV in more or less screens, we can’t detach the present state of television from a model that was developed when the concept of “media fragmentation” was completely foreign to society at large, leading to a rhythmic advertising-based model in which interruption was normal and accepted as part of the package. The model also created standards in which TV shows were symmetric in relation to the advertising pod. Every genre had a specific length and was broadcasted at the same time and under the same frequency.
This model is being reinvented in front of us enabled by the multiple screens and digital platforms that have transferred control back to the masses. Control of the means of production and control of content options, an explosive combination, dangerous but not lethal to traditional outlets in a world that is proving to be more about complementing than about substituting.
A great example of the new asymmetric model is referenced in a WIRED article titled “Must-Stream TV,” which reviews the ultra-local, grassroots internet sitcom The Burg. The article refers to the show and its model in the context of TV, which is interesting due to the fact that it is far from it. In that sense it acknowledges that its creators “aren’t trying to remake TV--they are trying to break into it.”
In more than one sense, The Burg is in fact remaking TV, or at least redefining the storytelling format of the sitcom [can we really disconnect the two?]. Compared with traditional TV shows, The Burg has clear differences that set it apart in interesting ways. Probably the most important is its asymmetric structure, in which no two episodes are equal. The typical episode can last anywhere from one minute to 16 minutes, and is uploaded without a predetermined frequency. This asymmetry is perhaps the key to fresh, entertaining content: free from the restrictions of mandatory length and frequency.
Although less unique than its asymmetric nature, another interesting feature of The Burg is its blog format, which allows for immediate participation from viewers which can potentially alter the course of the story or at least alter it within the subconscious mind of its producers, director, and actors, who most likely read viewer’s comments at one point or another.
At the end of the day whether TV survives or not is not as important as whether fresh thinking reinvents the nature of its somehow tired storytelling, opening up options beyond the traditional model in which creativity is not constrained by the format but rather leads it.
January 16, 2007
Who is Lying?
Henry Jenkins opens his book Convergence Culture with a brief account of the events that brought the imagination of a high school student to the public eye in different mediatic contexts. “Bert is Evil” offers the perfect example to illustrate the mechanics of Jenkins’ convergence culture. By taking Sesame Street’s Bert out of his context and placing him in a bizarre world, its creator accidentally provided visual support to anti-American protesters far away from Bert’s home at the same time that a set of reactions from the media and Bert’s owners unchained. Jenkins then welcomes the reader to “convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways.”
What follows is probably one of the most influential books in years to come, dissecting three essential concepts of modern media theory [media convergence, participatory culture, collective intelligence] and providing a framework to further advance the conversation surrounding contemporrary media channels [as he does almost daily in his blog as well as in the Convergence Culture Consortium weblog].
“Bert is Evil” is not only a great, radical example of convergence culture [which we will look at in detail at a later time]. It also provides an interesting platform to understand semiotics through the lens of Umberto Eco’s work, particularly through his Theory of the Lie, explained in the introduction of A Theory of Semiotics: “semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used ‘to tell’ at all.”
Keeping in mind that this is merely a grain of sand in the huge desert of Eco’s theory of semiotics, it nevertheless provides an interesting view of sings through which anyone can question and challenge the assumptions and preconceptions around them. In this specific case, we could always ask ourselves who is lying when it comes to Bert’s intentions. Is he really good or evil? The process of answering this and similar questions has the potential to unlock the semiotician that lives within us.
January 15, 2007
Diario Minimo, Remixed [# 03]
It is evident that most of the Airline industry (and its agencies) could benefit from the wisdom of parody. After all, parody has been a powerful genre to uncover that common knowledge that oftentimes gets dismissed as unimportant, remember Borat? In the words of Umberto Eco, parody, “if it strikes home, it will only prefigure something that others will then do without a smile –and without a blush– in steadfast, virile seriousness.”
Eco’s parody has indeed been taken seriously by a wide variety of professionals, from architects to anthropologists as he explains in the preface of How to Travel with a Salmon: “Parisian friends from Transcultura, an organization that imports African and Asian anthropologists to study European cities, say that their program was inspired by my ‘Industry and Sexual Repression in a Po Valley Society,’ in which Melanesian anthropologists analyzed the primitive Milanese by sophisticated phenomenological parameters.”
Going back to the Airline industry and inspired by a recent international trip, one wonders why so many of their resources are focused on advertising as opposed to solving structural issues (i.e. mediocre meals). Perhaps they need a different type of advice similar to Naked Communications' recommendation to Boots Pharmacy which led them to improve their in-store experience as opposed to create more TV spots (see a brief summary within a Fast Company article here).
In any case, the frustration that surrounds airplane meals have been documented for decades and Umberto Eco's Diario Minimo offered an insightful review in its article How to Eat in a Flight, published in the above-mentioned second compilation titled How to Travel with a Salmon.
Here is an excerpt from How to Eat in a Flight, written at least two decades ago. It drives home the point with amazing clarity:
“…a typical in-flight menu comprises some long-cooked meat smothered in brown gravy, generous portion of tomato, vegetables finely chopped and marinated in whine, rice, and peas with sauce. Peas are notoriously elusive –not even the greatest chefs can produce petits fois farcis– especially if, deterring to the insistence of Miss Maners, the consumer is determined to eat the peas with his fork rather than the more practical spoon. Don’t tell me that the Chinese are worse off. I can assure you it is easier to grip a pea with chopsticks than to pierce it with a fork. It is also pointless to rebut that the fork is used to collect the peas, not to pierce them, because forks are designed for the sole purpose of dropping the peas they pretend to collect.
Furthermore, peas in flight are dully served only when there is turbulence and the captain turns on the “fasten seat belts” sign. As a result of this complex ergonomic calculation, the peas have only two alternatives: either they roll down your shirtfront or they fall on your fly.
As the ancient fabulists taught us, to prevent a fox from drinking out of a glass, the glass must be tall and slim. Glasses on planes are short, squat, rather basin-like. Obviously, any liquid will spill, obeying the laws of physics, even when there is no turbulence. The bread is not a French baguette, which you have to tear with your teeth even when it’s fresh, but rather a special friable roll, which, the moment is grasped, explodes in a cloud of fine powder. Thanks to the Lavoisier principle this powder vanishes only in appearance: on debarking, you will find that it has all accumulated under your behind, managing to stain even the seat of your trousers. The desert tends to the meringue genre, and its fragments mix with the bread, or else it dribbles over the fingers immediately, when the napkin is already steeped in tomato sauce and hence unusable.
True, you still have the perfumed towelette: but this cannot be distinguished from the little envelopes of salt, pepper, and sugar, and so, after you have put the sugar in the salad, the towelettte has already ended in the coffee, which is served boiling hot and in a heat-conducting cup filled with brim, so that it may readily slip from your seared fingers and blend with the gravy that has now congealed around your waist…
…why, then, in first class, where space is ample, do they serve compact foods, like Russian caviar or buttered slices of toast, or smoked salmon or lobsters chunks with a drop of oil and lemon? Is it perhaps because in the films of Luchino Visconti, when the Nazi aristocrats say “shoot him,” they pop a single, compact grape into their mouth?”
January 10, 2007
The Visible and the Invisible
The beginning of 2007 is already suggesting that we are getting closer to accept comics as a serious and powerful communications channel. On the second day of the year, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Holy Heroes of Indian Lore. Batman!” which explains at length new ventures by Virgin Comics.
Richard Branson’s Virgin Group is taking an interesting approach to develop stories on comics, loosely based on traditional Indian mythologies and with preconceived cross-media extensions (mostly film). A bold approach includes recruiting the talent of two gifted film directors (John Woo and Guy Ritchie) to develop some of the stories, a move that will certainly raise the profile of the medium.
Also on the first week of January, The Economist published a short note referring to Philippe Cohen, Richard Malka, and Riss’ “La Face Karchée de Sarkozy;” the newest iteration of the political comic book in France (a country with a rich tradition with the medium). The book has also been at the center of a BBC article, discussed in several blogs, and even turned into amateur videos.
The recent success of Burger King’s Xbox arcade game series, with over 2 million copies sold at the end of 2006 (in just a few weeks), can’t be detached from pop culture’s increased appetite for comics. Since the beginning of the history of video games, designers have openly acknowledged the huge influence of comics in general and Japanese manga in specific on the video game medium. Chris Kohler documented this influence in multiple interviews with Japanese game designers; a great example comes from Nintendo’s Shigueru Miyamoto: “Thinking back, I would say that although it wasn’t done consciously, I ended up designing Donkey Kong like a traditional Japanese four-panel manga comic strip. That way of telling a story in four distinct parts seemed natural to me…”
Why is this medium so important? No one better to answer than Scott McCloud, who 14 years ago made a great push to liberate comics from its paradigm through his book “Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art.” Invisible because the mechanics of the medium include a great deal of interaction among the creator, channel, and reader that results in understanding beyond what is on paper. The visual language of comics lends itself to become a thought starter in the mind of the reader who often must complete the picture in her mind (in both, the literal and abstract sense). This exercise, known as closure, empowers comics with a unique and special faculty.
Invisible also because comics are created literally from nothing: ideas, pen, and paper. The medium of comics is as democratic as it is powerful, and the web as well as other internet-based platforms like Linden Lab’s Second Life will definitively play an important role in disseminating and offering new tools to artists and anyone with a vision.
We should welcome these developments because they will contribute to equalize tomorrow’s conversation while making us smarter in the process.
Images from Virgin Comics.
December 18, 2006
Vintage Revolution
Pay attention to the conversation about the present and future of the marketing and communications industry and you will enter a literal storm of ideas. Change is the premise, what worked in the previous decade is out today, as McLuhan said, “if it works, it’s obsolete.”
Pay closer attention and you will note that some of the new ideas begin to resemble the past. Just like fashion seems to be cyclical (e.g. skinny pants in the year 2006), marketing and communications might be secretly entering an age of reconciliation with some of the ideas that prevailed in its recent past. Russell Davies wrote about it last week, referring to the similarities between marketing 1.0 and marketing 2.0 and pointing out to a refreshing piece of research from Dr. Robert Heath that seems to be driving the discussion in a different direction (3.0 maybe?), focused more on the delivery of the message than on the message itself: “In advertising, it appears to be the case that it’s not what you say, but the way that you say it that gets results.” Or should we rather say: The medium is the message.
On the same day of Russell’s post, Scott Bedbury (former marketing executive from Starbucks, Nike – also author of A New Brand World), gave a keynote speech at Yahoo!’s “Engaging Advocates Through Search and Social Media” conference at The New York Public Library. The focus: “Achieving Brand Leadership in the 21st Century,” which ironically reinforced old-school brand-focused thinking peppered with new ideas in the brand advocate arena.
Bedbury’s lesson can be summarized in the view that remarkable brands are the result of “relevancy, creativity, and emotional connection.” His recipe to achieve this “remarkable” status requires a mix of brand connection with something “timeless and meaningful,” rooted in a great product or service that together with the brand represent a set of “values and promises” compatible with the audience’s heart. Emotional connection at its best, which ratifies at some extent Heath’s findings but from a different angle related to what you say rather than how you say it.
Emotion seems to be at the core of most schools of thought that seek a viable alternative to business-as-usual in the marketing and communications industry of the present. Emphasis on what you say rather than on how you say it or the contrary might not make a lot of sense when considering that the emotional connection that we are looking for is constrained by the attention economy in which what we say must be welcomed by means of actual, tangible value.
The logic of emotional connection makes sense and is valid as long as its mechanism includes something of value for the people at the other end. This is amplifying the meaning of (corporate) social responsibility to a whole new level, driven by the forces of the market, specifically by people with (media) options. Recognizing that the attention of any individual has value is probably a good place to begin revisiting all the good old thinking about emotions, regardless of whether you focus on the medium, the message, or both (can we actually separate them?).
Here is Nike’s “Revolution” spot which Mr. Bedbury used as an example of a piece of creative that contributed to Nike’s Air Max enormous success almost a decade ago. Nine years later Nike's revolution feels very different: It's Ipod-compatible.
December 11, 2006
Digital Dialect [part one]
It comes as an unfortunate surprise to learn that there is so little information about José Antonio Marina in English. Being one of the leading voices on the study of intelligence, the Spaniard philosopher definitively (and urgently) needs more attention in the English-speaking world. Paraphrasing the author, understanding human intelligence will determine what we know about ourselves which is essential to understand what we really are. In modern society, this question is central to grasp the mechanics of the individual and collective intelligence enabled by digital technology.
Marina’s first two books (which deserved multiple European awards) were dedicated to intelligence in its creative form. Teoría de la Inteligencia Creadora (the second one), displays a thorough scientific analysis through a delightful prose, demonstrating right and left brain thinking in equal parts. The book is a mélange of neurology, artificial intelligence, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy, which blend to produce a theory that describes the creative process in a dense but entertaining manner, using two powerful examples: sports and arts.
An important part of the argument is the exploration of language as essential to understand and create meaning. Marina elaborates on the school of thought that considers language to be our prison due to the fact that we can only think what language allows us to think; adding that language is more like a halt which provides support in the production of meaning. Language is then where human beings unify information composed of images, values, voices, etc., and unload it into words.
In the context of our digital society, understanding our creative intelligence and the role of language is essential to come to terms with the real impact of the human-computer relationship and the implications to the great majority of people without access to this digital world.
The graphic user interface (GUI), is that element of modern computing that facilitates the dialogue between the human mind and the operations performed by the machine. It has evolved to a point that it blends seamlessly with the final result, rendering several layers of programming and mathematics invisible to us. The modern GUI has been feeding from language and its metaphors in the quest to become easier, more intuitive. Today the GUI could very well be considered some sort of language of its own, renovating and extending our “prison” and therefore allowing us to refine our own thoughts.
An attempt to digest Marina’s theories on human intelligence as part of the dialogue around the digital divide (the division between those with access to computers and the internet versus those without it), can potentially lead to uncover another dimension of the problem: A dimension that looks way beyond the economic, educational, and social aspects into a deeper division in the way we process information.
More about this subject soon.
December 06, 2006
The Megamind on TV
“Former MIT president Jerome Wiesner tells a story about (Vladimir) Zworykin’s visiting him one Saturday at the White House when Wiesner was JFK’s science advisor (and close friend). He asked Zworykin if he had ever met the president. As Zworykin had not, Wiesner took him across the hall to meet JFK. Wiesner introduced his visitor to the president as ‘the man who got you elected.’ Startled, JFK asked, ‘How is that?’ Wiesner explained, “This is the man who invented television.’ JFK replied how that was a terrific and important thing to have done. Zworykin wryly commented, ‘Have you seen television recently?’”
The quote belongs to Nicolas Negroponte’s Being Digital; sadly the same conversation could have happened yesterday. TV hasn’t improved that much in the forty years that followed. Back in 1995 Negroponte predicted that “being digital will change the nature of mass media from a process of pushing bits at people to one of allowing people (or their computers) to pull at them,” declaring an upcoming revolution that will evolve our “concept of media” from the filters that reduce content to “a collection of top stories or best-sellers” to a model of “narrowcasting” in which “the information industry will become more of a boutique business.” Sounds familiar?
Eleven years ago Negroponte forecasted his own version of what is known today as The Long Tail, in which society, empowered by the digital ecosystem, creates a marketplace that balances the overwhelming power of the “hit culture.”
In 2006 people are not only driving the development of a vast marketplace for products, services, and content, but are also collaborating (most of the time anonymously) to develop and remix information, much like Pierre Levy’s concept of the Social Megamind (see more details in an earlier post).
In the age of collective intelligence and digital collaboration it is almost impossible to keep this trend limited to the web. According to a Royal Magazine article, Current TV is reinventing how (television) content is developed by creating a system of participation that is opening the door for what the station calls “viewer created content.” Anyone can submit her own show to Current TV’s website where a community of viewers decides whether or not the material should be broadcasted. The system creates content that ends up being the final product of a collective effort, boosting creativity and leveraging cross-media synergies in a way that really adds value to public life by making a dramatic change in the tired TV landscape.
Tune in and judge for yourself.
December 05, 2006
Emerging World [part four]
The Avatar
Three years is essentially nothing in the context of normal human lifespan, it is also nothing in many other contexts related to almost all areas of knowledge. In the case of the emerging digital world, three years can represent a huge gap between an idea, a premonition if you will, and its (always work-in-progress) execution.
Three years ago, right at the beginnings of Linden Lab’s Second Life, Ron Burnett published How Images Think, in which the artist explored the mechanics of visualization within the new ecosystem created by digital images as “integral part of all media, including animation, video games, data visualization, and the internet.” Burnett’s work also looked at the interactive experience in which spectators become participants and collaboration develops into a new form of intelligence.
Although How Images Think deals with virtual worlds and computer animated images, it does not directly addresses what was at the time the newborn Second Life, almost entirely unknown to most people and miles away from what it eventually became in 2006. Nevertheless Burnett offers an important contribution to imagining the avatar:
“Imagine an avatar that looks like a person, walks like a person, and is able to participate in worlds that people could never dream of entering. The magic here remains under the viewer’s control. Spectators are able to explore microworlds and macroworlds through their avatars. They can return in time to the terrible excess of a decaying Rome or go forward to hypothetical futures. As viewer-avatars play or walk among the people and places they and animators have created, they can change their characteristics to suit the feelings and responses they are having to the experience.”
Now, what is most interesting about this visualization of the avatar is that it is extracted out of a review of emerging forms of animation, specifically referring to digital films such as Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within (2001). According to Burnett, the avatar in film eventually achieves a level of identification from the audience that makes her real, closer to be perceived as a human entity. Fast forward three years later and you will be able to enter a more evolved (and popular) Second Life, where most avatars are created after human images and are essential part of a virtual world that can very well be a movie.
The cinematic feel of this emerging world transfer certain quality to avatars endowing them with the magic of cinema. We become part of this never-ending film, both part and creators of the story, which has the same elements of unpredictability as traditional audiovisual storytelling. The experience is different every time. Looking at avatars as characters of a movie or perhaps even a TV show (a reality TV show) can help us decode the meaning embedded in them, after all they are not merely representations of their creators but the result of a process in which conscious aesthetic decisions are made, communicating a wealth of information about the individual behind the avatar.
Eva and Franco Mattes (internationally know as 0100101110101101.org) are initiating an exploration of the avatar through its aesthetics (I’m sure a lot more will follow); their new portrait exhibition “13 most beautiful avatars,” is the result of one year of traveling around Second Life. The outcome is a photo exhibit that feels more like virtual anthropology than a digital catalogue or artistic documentation.
December 04, 2006
The Language of Participation
The Economist published an interesting note on social news within its latest Technology Quarterly. It addresses the emerging role of this new media form and provides a capsule with most of the relevant facts using the two most prominent examples of traditional and social news websites: The New York Times Digital and Digg.com.
Beyond the numbers that favor traditional outlets in terms of traffic and the fact that yes, Digg and other social news sites draw most of their content from established publishers; the comparison might not be fair. In fact, we could consider this attempt to put these two media forms side by side misleading. To begin with (and this is acknowledged in the article), Digg and other social news sites do not produce content, that alone sets them aside into its own category. The new breed of social news sites are mere facilitators, leveraging technology to exploit the social megamind that is the internet (see more details on a previous post).
Outside of the question of whether or not these two sites can be compared, the article opens the door for a much more meaningful discussion centered on the layer of meaning attached to social news sites or any other collaborative effort to distribute information over the internet (i.e. Wikipedia.org).
What are the implications of consuming information that has been brought to you by a community of readers (collective intelligence) as opposed to an editor? Is it more credible? Less credible? Just acknowledging the fact that some of these questions (and others in the same vein) are valid will lead us to accept the existence of that layer of meaning asssociated with collective intelligence and that has the potential to alter how we understand and perceive news information. This is essential to see the value of social news sites and their impact in modern readers.
November 30, 2006
Cool [Sponsored] Redesign
Cool Hunting has been reinventing the blog as a communications channel since February 2003. The site challenges the conventions of what a blog should be to the point that it is not even a blog anymore, it feels more like a ezine that adopted this emerging medium becoming a hybrid that communicates immediacy through its media design at the same time that lets content flow seamlessly through its blog-like interface.
The redesign has been sponsored by Adobe, which can also be considered as a breakthrough marketing initiative by the software company. With over 55 million blogs and over 2 billion websites, “design sponsoring” is set to become a discipline in itself, offering a win-win situation to all parties involved: the brand, site owner, and the people reading.
The question is then, should this trend be owned exclusively by software brands?
Perhaps not. By facilitating the redesign of a popular site that is consistent with a particular brand persona, the brand in question can impact people’s experience in a meaningful, non-intrusive way. Design in general and its digital, interactive form in particular carry a wealth of meaning and brands can use this vehicle to express not only their more rational benefits (in the case of Adobe this is obvious) but emotional ones, all without interfering with the site’s personality. Not an easy task but consistent with the level of sophistication needed to become a successful brand these days.
November 27, 2006
Diario Minimo, Remixed [# 02]
Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail reminds us of what we already knew but rarely rationalized: “A hit-driven economy is a hit-driven culture.” Google search “hit-driven culture” today and you will get over 330 results mostly consisting of bloggers and “mainstream media” sites debating whether or not this form of culture is dying. Almost all of them refer to Chris Anderson’s book, which lays the foundation to understand the economics of a hit-driven culture (as well as its nemesis) while letting the cultural aspect itself open for much needed discussion.
Regardless of its longevity, this paradigm has been annoying artists, intellectuals, and anyone with the drive to craft content, for decades. After all, as Anderson clearly stated, “setting out to make a hit is not exactly the same thing as setting out to make a good movie,” or a good book, record, play, etc.
Right at the beginning of our hit-driven culture, Umberto Eco published in Diario Minimo (see details in previous post), an essay titled “Regretfully, We Are Returning Your…” which dealt with imaginary assessments of [hit-driven] publishers evaluating the manuscripts of Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce and others. The piece flows just as well in 2006, and probably even better due to the fact that we might be experiencing an increasingly general annoyance with the mechanisms and end results of contemporary mainstream culture.
Here is Eco’s imaginary rejection of Don Quixote (published in Misreadings), just fast forward 34 years and imagine some record label executive doing the same thing:
Cervantes, Miguel, Don Quixote
The book -the readable parts of it, anyway- tells the story of a Spanish gentleman and his manservant who roam the world pursuing chivalrous dreams. This Don Quixote is half crazy (the character is fully developed, and Cervantes knows how to spin a tale). The servant is a simpleton endowed with some rough common sense, and the reader identifies with him as he tries to deflate his master’s fantasies. So much for the story, which has some good dramatic twists and a number of amusing and meaty scenes. My objection is not based on my personal response to the book.
In our successful low-price series, “The Facts of Life,” we have published, with admirable results, Amadis of Gaul, The Legend of the Graal, The Romance of Tristan, The Lay of the Little Bird, The Tale of Troy, and Erec and Enid. Now we also have an option of The Kings of France by that promising young Barberino, and if you ask me, it’ll be the book of the year and maybe even a book of the month, because it has real grass-roots appeal. Now, if we do this Cervantes, we’ll be bringing out a book that, for all its intrinsic value, will mess up our whole list, because it suggests those novels are lunatic ravings. Yes, I know all about freedom of expression, political correctness, and what have you, but we can’t very well bite the hand that feeds us. Besides, this book seems a one-shot deal. The writer has just got out of jail, he’s in bad shape, I can’t remember whether it isn’t raring to write something else. I’m afraid that in rushing to produce something new at all costs we might jeopardize a publishing program that has so far proved popular, moral, and (let’s be frank) profitable. I say no.
November 13, 2006
Emerging World [part three]
The Semantic Web
Pierre Lévy explains the modus operandi of dialectics and rhetoric as part of the “operations of virtualization:”
“A prehistoric man sees a branch. He recognizes it for what it is. But history doesn’t stop there, for the man, initiating a process of dialectic, sees double. He squints at the branch and imagines a stick. The branch signifies the stick. The branch is a virtual stick. Substitution. All technology is founded on this capacity for twisting and doubling reality… A real entity, embedded in its identity and function, suddenly harbors a different function, another identity, becomes a component in new assemblies…” And the process goes on and on until it becomes ubiquitous, being at the core of the way we create meaning by a system of association in which any particular object can have multiple names with the same meaning or multiple meanings attached to the same name.
In the virtual world of the web, text is one of the essential tools to make sense of the limitless wealth of information that exists in its networks. The problem with text is that it is too objective for the computerized mind and requires human discern to decode it in a real, human way. A front page article in yesterday’s New York Times posed an answer to this problem in the shape of an improvement in the way people and computers collaborate.
The article explained that researchers are “working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.” The objective of that content “exploitation” is simply to aid database networks to become better at identifying associations and therefore at adding meaning. Software alone can identify text and even rank it a la Google; however it has been unable to precisely make sense of all the human nuances attached to it.
As discussed in our previous post on this subject, tagging is already contributing to the evolution of language, in this case via facilitating the textualization of images, sound, and video. This has tremendous implications on the way the new generation of database systems (the NYT article mentioned Radar Networks as a leading technology) will impact our lives through perfecting artificial intelligence that can save huge amounts of time making (human) sense of the web for us, so we can dedicate more time to enjoy life in the good old human way.
November 08, 2006
Diario Minimo, Remixed [# 01]
The success of Borat brought back good memories. We would like to revisit the great parody that, in the shape of literary pastiche, lived in a monthly column in the pages of the Italian literary magazine Il Verri. Known as Diario Minimo and led by Umberto Eco, the column was published regularly between 1959 and 1961, offering an “inside out” look at the “languages of daily life.”
Diario has been compiled and published in a few opportunities, beginning with an Italian edition in 1963 (with the same name, reprinted in 1975) and followed by at least two English-language versions in 1992 (How to Travel with a Salmon & other essays), and 1993 (Misreadings), each focused on different topics.
The sharp observation displayed in Diario Minimo is as relevant today as it was over 40 years ago. We find this extremely impressive. For example, the column titled “The Discovery of America” was inspired by the US landing on the moon and evokes a mediatic spirit that is still very much alive in the same way (remember yesterday’s TV coverage of the midterm elections?). Revisiting Diario can uncover the essence of contemporary culture through those details that remain unchanged four decades later.
Click on the image below to read the (short) essay.
Enjoy.
October 31, 2006
Collectively Thinking Twice
Last week we wrote about the social megamind, that mechanism powered by collective intelligence that is now almost ubiquitous in the so-called Web 2.0 wave of sites.
The recently-released After These Messages (still in beta) represents an interesting experiment in this arena, stimulating the participation of professionals and students of communication in the conversation about “the power that our messages yield,” viewed through the lens of ethics and in the context of the effects of communication (of any type) in society and culture.
I signed in a few days ago and went straight to review the Terry Richardson Lee Jeans campaign, my evaluation felt at the exact opposite side of the spectrum when compared with the average of 60 other reviews. That is beautiful, true intellectual democracy in action.
With time and sincere community involvement this website has the potential to add significant value to our thought process as professionals in this arena, which can therefore affect the outcome of our work. Hopefully its users will keep playing within the realm of ethics and away from moral judgment.
Thanks to my friend Aristides Barrios for the lead.
October 30, 2006
Pop [minus] Advertising
Last week’s nightlife intelligencer from New York Magazine featured a review of the now one year old Fresa Salvaje, a multimedia celebration that combines “projections of kitschy Mexican movies and fashion ads played on the walls, (with) New York City’s Latin expatriate hipster elite pogo-bopped to Spanish-language, nouveau-eighties electropop and vintage rock.”
This event can be interpreted as another manifestation of Lawrence Lessig’s Remix Culture, with an interesting combination of old and new. Its curator was qualified as having “a highly discerning taste for retro-kitsch,” which essentially means an ability to bring back to life decades-old pop artists in a way that sounds relevant today.
At the end of the note there is a quote from an MTV employee condescendingly dismissing the trend as “nostalgic,” which caught my attention because it’s coming from someone representing the modern world of pop, the one that might eventually become trendy in 30 years. The question is then why 70’s pop can perfectly fit a Williamsburg party while modern Latin pop is bluntly rejected? I doubt is just nostalgia.
An article published in the October 15th issue of American Way brought me back to this question on a recent plane trip back from South America. Gregory Katz wrote a note about Ferrari titled “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” in which a Ferrari executive justified their lack of investment in Advertising due to the fact that it is too ordinary for the brand, which solely relies on its sponsorship of Scuderia Ferrari to communicate key brand messages.
The structure of modern pop music relies on a hefty marketing machine that churns out advertising in all sizes and formats. It works to some extent because it turns these artists into celebrities with plenty of dollars attached to the status. However, on the other hand it creates rejection that might not necessarily be linked to the actual music but to what it represents. Advertising is then working as an invisible signifier for ordinary in the same way viewed by Ferrari’s brand folks. This might be a good reason why tons of indie bands fail at launch whenever picked up by a big record label: they get on the advertising train way too soon and it interferes with the development of a clear, relevant identity.
It is likely that we bump into some vintage Paulina Rubio in 2036, already stripped from all the baggage of advertising, within the virtual pages of the trendy nightlife guide of the future.
October 25, 2006
Emerging World [part two]
The Megamind
We would like to follow the previous post continuing with a revisionist look at Becoming Virtual. We need to keep in mind that this book was published almost a decade ago which can provide some context to the magnitude of Pierre Lévy’s vision of virtuality as it relates to present time.
The commercialization of collective intelligence can be considered an important milestone in the development of the web as a medium. Known as web2.0, the new wave of successful commercial enterprises on the internet share, among other things, the aggregation of the minds of its users. Lévy back in 1998 referred to it as the “social megamind,” the matter that shapes collective intelligence.
To better understand this fractal megamind and how it can be created for any purpose, it is important to revisit the four operations as presented in Lévy’s work:
“Acting on connectivity: setting up networks, opening gateways, distributing or restricting information, maintaining firewalls, filtering information, or even guaranteeing the safety of the group (communication, transport, commerce, training, social services, police, armies, governments, etc.)”
Open networks are almost always followed by policing in the shape of filtering software, cyber patrollers, or any other kind of control mechanism. This lesson was quickly learned by the NewsCorp team that took over My Space. It is well-known today that the company still struggles with the so-called “security” issue to the point that this year My Space hired a former federal prosecutor as its first chief security officer.
“Creating or modifying representations and images, and helping the languages in use and the signs in circulation to evolve (art, science, technology, industry, media, etc.)”
Probably the best example of this type of operation is del.icio.us. As a bookmark community, this site quickly became the quintessential example of folksonomy, however, an unnoticed effect has been the result of letting its users create their own tags. This democratic approach to tagging has led to an evolution of the language that refers to certain topics, representations, and areas of knowledge, reclassifying subjects into new definitions that take the form of tags.
“Creating, transforming, or maintaining tropisms, values, and social affects: good and evil, useful and harmful, pleasant and painful, beautiful and ugly (education, religion, philosophy, morality, etc.)”
Digg.com is a new species of the news site that is “all about user powered content,” every article featured on the site has been submitted, rated, or discarded by its own users. It is a perfect example of the megamind transforming, or maintaining tropism, trying to get rid of the censorship and control of the old media model.
“Modifying, displacing, enhancing, or diminishing the strength of the affects associated with a given representation in circulation (media, publicity, commerce, rhetoric)”
This is probably the oldest use of collective intelligence. Wikipedia comes to mind as a perfect example, it is the people’s encyclopedia, where anyone can modify, enhance, displace, or diminish the strength of anything related to anything. Knowledge growths at the speed of light and it also mutate at the same speed. Wikipedia is the electronic persona of the organic mind.
More about this subject soon.
October 24, 2006
Facts versus Ideas
Is this an “either-or” situation? Apparently yes.
In an op-ed note by Joseph Epstein published last Thursday in The Wall Street Journal, the author of Friendship: An Exposé, philosophizes on the implications of one over the other, concluding that “in an ideal world, facts would reinforce and enrich ideas.” Epstein quickly reminds us that “this ideal world… hasn’t quite arrived.”
The dichotomy is logical: “the more facts one has at one’s command, the less is inspiration for ideas likely to arrive.” Facts are the very basic structure of knowledge and tend to grow as the walls of specialization. The stronger the facts, the highest and thickest the walls. This is probably the reason why innovation hardly happens within the strict realm of a particular discipline.
The case of the Advertising industry offers one of the clearest examples of this confrontation. The past decade has seen change at the speed of light and marketers are now under greater pressure to demonstrate the impact of advertising on their business. The combination of greater pressure on ROI and a fragmented media environment with infinite possibilities for dialogue (hear consumers back, quantify, measure, etc.) has led the industry towards previously unseen collaboration attempts between the science of direct marketing and the art of advertising.
The result: an inevitable clash of ideas versus facts.
Some agencies have merged and redefined themselves as the new breed of global groups. The most notorious so far is DraftFCB, which defines itself as a “marketing communications agency designed to build clients’ businesses by focusing on the individual and coming up with ideas that drive behavior in the most creative ways.”
In my opinion, the delivery of this promise depends on the ability of the Direct Marketing professional (who will rightfully lead the transformation in most cases) of not getting on the way of “conjecture, speculation, delightful mental footwork of all kinds,” and on the contrary, become an advocate for untested, factess, ideas. Ignorance drives innovation.
October 19, 2006
Emerging World [part one]
Virtuality
In the process of demonstrating the tradition of the virtual as a persistent “component of the human mind,” Pierre Lévy finishes the second chapter of his book Becoming Virtual as follows:
“My own body is the temporary actualization of an enormous hybrid, social, and technobiological hyperbody. The contemporary body resembles a flame. It is often tiny, isolated, separated, nearly motionless. Later, it moves outside itself, intensified by sports or drugs, is transmitted by means of a satellite, launches a virtual arm high in the air, flows through medical or communications networks. It entwines itself with the public body and burns with the same heat, shines with the same light as other body flames. It then returns, transformed, to its quasi-private sphere, and continues thus, sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes alone with others. One day, it will detach itself completely from the hyperbody and vanish.”
Perhaps the days in which we are able to completely detach our virtual entity from the real thing (hyperbody) are not too far away. Lévy reminds us that the virtual has been with us for a long time: since the invention of tools that (virtually) extend body parts; mass media that create a collective eye, allowing us to experience the same event in a detached, collective manner; telephones that let us be here and there through extending our voice; and the more sophisticated virtual reality, so popular in the nineties when Becoming Virtual was published.
Since 2003, the virtual has a new expression in the form of Linden Lab’s Second Life. Free from the constrain of traditional massive multiplayer online 3D web games (that is, of being a “game”), Second Life (SL) virtualizes the economy, education, consumerism, flirting, vanity, experimentation, and the very basics of social interaction.
Pierre Lévy, back in 1998, was preparing us to accept a virtual space like SL on the grounds that we are, by nature, already virtual. That would explain the tremendous adoption rate of this technology/service, which grew from 920,000 to over one million members since last Monday. Way faster than the growth rate of 20% forecasted by The Economist last week.
Second Life is developing into something bigger than anything we have seen in the media space. It has the potential to aggregate all the technological features that make the Internet so practical, social, entertaining, multimedia, democratic, and most importantly, useful to hundreds of millions; and fuse them with an intuitive, easy-to-use, 3D interface that amplifies reality, adding an element of thrill and discovery to the equation.
October 16, 2006
Magazine Now
The Magazine as Artform was probably the most interesting (and fresh) panel last Saturday in the first day of Tokion’s Creativity Now 2006 conference. On the opposite end, the Non-Traditional Advertising panel was, in my view, the most boring, full of buzzwords threw at the public packaged with well-articulated thoughts and already traditional recipes.
What made the magazine panel so fresh is probably it’s context in a world of media that’s declaring the death of the printed word in favor of new media, that is, digital media. For instance, The Economist declared just a few months ago that the last newspaper reader will toss away the last copy in 2043, that is scary. Ironically all these bad news have been disseminated primarily through print media, which suggests some kind of mediatic paranoia taking place.
In the context of this paranoia, Saturday’s session at The Cooper Union reflected a different future, perhaps one that we could already see coming or suspect that is possible: the magazine as an object is, in some cases, an intimate part of a structure of meaning, larger that the magazine itself, and this will support the existence of the magazine, not as media but as a manifestation of the industry that it represents.
Oliver Zahm, co-founder of Purple Fashion, explained how beyond being a “personal object” (which therefore means that non-personal magazines are doomed to exists as catalogues on the internet or just disappear), the magazine, and specifically, the fashion magazine, is part of a system (not just an industry) and therefore indispensable to that system as it’s manifestation.
Zahm’s argument is not universal, nor is meant to be a prediction of the future, however, it places the fashion magazine (and I’m sure other genres) in a different category of media that is even more connected with it’s subject and combine with a series of other elements, which exist beyond the magazine, to produce meaning. This should be embraced at least as hope for those of us in love with the medium.
October 11, 2006
Blumenfeld’s Vision
London-based SHOWstudio is giving us the gift of Erwin Blumenfeld’s magic through a series of previously unreleased films on advertising. Experiments in Advertising: The Films of Erwin Blumenfeld is a virtual show of the photographer's experiments with film from 1958 to 1964, which makes the final product even more impressive given the level of technical skills needed to produce such work at that time.
An interview with Blumenfeld’s son Yorick, makes for an interesting companion piece to the films. A writer himself, Yorick Blumenfeld offers some insight on the motivations and general mindset of his father at the moment of producing these shorts.
Yorick also provides a blunt impression of his father’s feelings towards advertising and commercial work versus what he considered more artful, personal stuff. In this part the old dichotomy of art versus advertising comes afloat. In the context of his father’s autobiographical work, Yorick tells us that the photographer “felt that much of his time had been spent in a world of advertising, and making money, and he saw this as a form of prostitution,” which led to his self-portraits in the red light of Dutch prostitutes.
The fact that such a prominent figure of the world of fashion is reflected under such a strong moral light help us understand these rare films, which definitively depart from and land on the territory of art, but with the clear advertising aura throughout. This is why he was unable to sell them as TV commercials at that time (although they could probably make it to the small screen now), the paradigm reversed itself and came back to haunt him, the films were too pure for the advertising world, that is if pure is the exact opposite of prostitution in the stiff world of stereotypes (which are no more than empty signifiers).
In any case, the experimental TV spots of Erwin Blumenfeld are not only interesting to watch and extremely beautiful but offer us a vision of advertising that was ahead of his time. Once we are able to strip them from Barthes’ “moral feelings” it is easy to appreciate how the artist (?) had the vision of making something beautiful for his audience, of adding value to the people watching. Isn’t that the new trend, the base of the new wave of advertising?
Thanks again to Mogollon for contributing.
October 10, 2006
The enemy is Mother Nature
As harsh as it sounds, this is exactly what an ad published in The Wall Street Journal this past August explained. Our focus today is not on the politics of the organization that made the ad, which, in my view deserve some credit. We would rather focus on the use of the figure of the enemy as an empty container of meaning.
The huge headline of the full-page piece read: “How do you deal with an enemy that has no government, no money trail and no qualms about killing women and children?” It then went on to reveal who the enemy is and focused on Hurricane Katrina as support.
This piece of advertising offers an excellent example to understand signifiers, which are empty containers by definition and can lead to a lot of fluff if not identified and tackled on time. What is interesting about them is that they have the potential to reflect a structure of thinking that seems to be embedded in western society: we tend to think in pairs simplifying and dismissing actual meaning under the pretext of associations.
Martin McQuillan, a professor in Cultural Theory and Analysis from the University of Leeds, offers great insight on how to break with the misleading pattern of western thinking (binary associations) in his introduction to Deconstruction: A Reader. First, it is important to understand what deconstruction teaches us, which is that “we should not assume that the way we perceive the world is the same as the world actually is.” So, the enemy is not necessarily the enemy.
When explaining binary oppositions, McQuillan uses the example of the “way the West has traditionally considered its other, the East,” and summarized a list of terms that characterized the way in which the East as a “non-Western world” has been represented, among the list of pairs are rational-irrational, recognizable-exotic, scientific-mystical, reason-superstition, etc. I’m sure you get the point.
Going back to Mother Nature as our ultimate enemy, the piece of advertising in question is successful in using an empty signifier to get our attention through all the preconceived connotations of fear and contempt that we usually associate with non-friends. However, by taking this shortcut, the add falls in the trap of binary associations and contradicts itself by simplifying the issue and pointing a finger towards the wrong enemy.
